Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

He waited until she’d left the other girls, and then he followed her down the street that led to her house. When he caught up to her and grabbed her arm, she shrieked.

“God!” she said. “Peter, why don’t you just scare me to death!”

He had worked out what he was going to ask her in his mind, because words didn’t come easily to him, and he knew that he had to practice them more than others would; but when he had Josie this close, after everything that had happened, every question felt like a slap. Instead, he sank onto the curb, spearing his hands through his hair. “Why?” he asked.

She sat down next to him, folding her arms over her knees. “I’m not doing it to hurt you.”

“You’re such a fake with them.”

“I’m just not the way I am with you,” Josie said.

“Like I said: fake.”

“There’s different kinds of real.”

Peter scoffed. “If that’s what those jerks are teaching you, it’s bullshit.”

“They’re not teaching me anything,” Josie argued. “I’m there because I like them. They’re fun and funny and when I’m with them-” She broke off abruptly.

“What?” Peter prompted.

Josie looked him in the eye. “When I’m with them,” she said, “people like me.”

Peter guessed change could be that dramatic: in an instant, you could go from wanting to kill someone to wanting to kill yourself.

“I won’t let them make fun of you anymore,” Josie promised. “That’s a silver lining, right?”

Peter didn’t respond. This wasn’t about him.

“I just…I just can’t really hang out with you right now,” Josie explained.

He lifted his face. “Can’t?”

Josie stood up, backing away from him. “I’ll see you around, Peter,” she said, and she walked out of his life.

You can feel people staring; it’s like heat that rises from the pavement during summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don’t have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it’s about you.

I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn’t tell. I mean, I was just me.

Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did.

That was the day I started to believe they might be right.

Ten Days After

Josie waited until she could no longer hear the television in her mother’s bedroom-Leno, not Letterman-and then rolled onto her side to watch the LED acrobatics of the digital clock. When it was 2:00 a.m., she decided it was safe, and she pulled back her covers and got out of bed.

She knew how to sneak downstairs. She’d done it a couple of times before, meeting Matt outside in the backyard. One night, he’d texted her on her cell-1/2 2 C U now. She had gone out to him in her pajamas, and for a moment when he touched her she actually thought she would slip through his fingers.

There was only one landing where the floorboards creaked, and Josie knew enough to step over it. Downstairs, she rummaged through the stack of DVDs for the one she wanted-the one she didn’t want to be caught viewing. Then she turned on the television, muting the sound so low she had to sit right on top of the screen and its built-in speakers to hear.

The first person shown was Courtney. She held up her hand, blocking whoever had been videotaping. She was laughing, though; her long hair falling over her features like a screen of silk. Offscreen, Brady Pryce’s voice: Give us something for Girls Gone Wild, Court. The camera fuzzed out for a moment, and then there was a close-up of a birthday cake. HAPPY SWEET SIX-TEEN, JOSIE. A run of faces, including Haley Weaver’s, singing to her.

Josie paused the DVD. There was Courtney, and Haley, and Maddie, and John, and Drew. She touched her finger to each of their foreheads, getting a tiny electric shock each time.

At her birthday party, they’d had a barbecue at Storrs Pond. There were hot dogs and hamburgers and sweet corn. They had forgotten the ketchup and someone had to drive back into town to buy some at a mini-mart. Courtney’s card had been signed BFF, best friends forever, even though Josie knew she’d written the same thing on Maddie’s card a month earlier.

By the time the screen fuzzed out again and her own face came on, Josie was crying. She knew what was coming; she remembered this part. The camera panned back and there was Matt, his arms around her as she sat on his lap on the sand. He had taken off his shirt, and Josie remembered that his skin had been warm where it pressed up against hers.

How could you be so alive one moment, and then have everything stop-not just your heart and your lungs, but the way you smiled slowly, the left side of your mouth curling before the right; and the pitch of your voice; and the habit you had of tugging at your hair when you were doing your math homework?

I can’t live without you, Matt used to say, and now Josie realized he wouldn’t have to.

She couldn’t stop sobbing, so Josie pushed her fist into her mouth to keep herself from making noise. She watched Matt on the screen the way you might study an animal you had never seen before, if you had to memorize it and tell the world later what you’d found. Matt’s hand splayed across her bare stomach, grazed the edge of her bikini top. She watched herself push him away, blush. “Not here,” her voice said, a funny voice, a voice that didn’t sound like Josie to her own ears. You never did, when you heard yourself on tape.

“Then let’s go somewhere else,” Matt said.

Josie ruched up the edge of her pajama top, until she could reach underneath. She spread her own hand across her belly. She edged her thumb up, like Matt had, to the curve of her breast. She tried to pretend it was him.

He had given her a gold locket for that birthday, one she hadn’t taken off since that day nearly six months ago. Josie was wearing it on the DVD. She remembered that when she’d looked at it in the mirror, Matt’s thumbprint had been on the back, left behind after he clasped it around her neck. That had seemed so intimate, and for a few days, she had done everything she could to keep it from rubbing off.

On the night that Josie had met Matt out in her own backyard, beneath the moon, he’d laughed at her pajamas, printed all over with pictures of Nancy Drew. What were you doing when I texted you? he asked.

Sleeping. Why did you have to see me in the middle of the night?

To make sure you were dreaming about me, he said.

On the DVD, someone called out Matt’s name. He turned, grinning. His teeth were wolf’s teeth, Josie thought. Sharp, impossibly white. He stamped a kiss on Josie’s mouth. “Be right back,” he said.

Be right back.

She pressed Pause again, just as Matt stood up. Then she reached around her neck and ripped the locket off its thin gold chain. She unzipped one of the couch cushions and pushed the necklace deep inside the stuffing.

She turned off the television. She pretended that Matt would be suspended like that forever, inches away from Josie so that she could still reach out and grab him, even though she knew that the DVD would reset itself even before she left the room.

Lacy had known they were out of milk; that morning, as she and Lewis sat like zombies at the kitchen table, she had brought it up:

I hear it’s going to rain again.

We’re out of milk.

Have you heard from Peter’s lawyer?

It devastated Lacy to know that she could not visit Peter again for another week-jail rules. It killed her to know Lewis hadn’t been there to see him at all yet. How was she supposed to go through the motions of an ordinary day, knowing that her son was sitting in a cell less than twenty miles away?